Kids & Parenting

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Pregnancy Block
Folakemi Emem-Akpan
All of my writing years, I have heard of writer’s block so often that it has become a litany of sorts, the kind that lazy writers sing to justify their inertia. So when I began to have pregnancy rather than writer’s block, I thought that I was going crazy bit by bit.

I was married on the last day of April, and the euphoria of being someone’s wife carried well over into the following month, rendering me useless at my computer. By June, when I was mentally ready to get back to my lifelong vocation, I discovered I was in the family way and with the pregnancy came pregnancy block.

My morning sickness extended well into the evenings, and with my febrile condition came vivid thoughts and ideas on projects I needed to work on. My imagination went into overdrive and more often than not, I constructed whole scenes in my head, substituting better adjectives for simply fashionable ones. The problem was that I could not sit at my computer for more than five minutes before I had to rush to the bathroom to throw up, such that it became useless thinking up new scenes and projects I could in no wise save for posterity. For my feverish state also caused me to be very absentminded, such that I forgot even the most beautiful scenes before the next day.

In those early months, it wasn’t only my private ramblings in the world of fiction that suffered. My job as a journalist also did, and my husband was scared of me losing my job. I called my sources less and less, and I wrote front-page stories in a manner that made my editor hide them in obscure pages of the paper.

Whoever says good food does not equal productivity does not know the first thing about lugging an extra human weight around your midsection. I’m a step away from my third trimester now, and at last; my tapping away on the computer has grown to match the thoughts that flood my head (well, almost). I will be the first person to postulate that my productivity has returned because my appetite has.

Last week, my editor added yet another page to my workload and I was in no way discomfited, and just last night, my husband came into the house and shook his head warily.
“What in the heavens is going on? Why are papers strewn all over the floor?” he bent down to pick one of the papers; Fields of blood, by Folakemi Emem-Akpan. “You’re working again?” he asked a question that needed no answer.
I nodded merrily and went back to my work, only to hear him rummaging in the refrigerator.
“What happened to the chicken I kept here, and what about the box of chocolates…and the milk…”
“…and the salad.” I finished for him.
Well, you can guess; all gone into my new venture - writing and eating.

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